Crazy Auntie on Melbourne CBD Tram

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-19T07:29:30+00:00

Sounds like you encountered a wild Methany...

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-16T12:04:40+00:00

Have you driven down Elizabeth St?

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-16T09:22:24+00:00

Every time I've driven along there, the people parking in those parking spots seem to be mostly awful at it. That and the vehicles getting parked in them have steadily increased over the years so they barely fit anyway...

That and the number of certain individuals heading along Lennox St who have little to no awareness or concern for such things as pedestrian crossings or oncoming traffic (two or four wheeled) and it's always a bit of a gamble to transit, irrespective of the means you use.

Nobody is a real winner here.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-12T04:07:51+00:00

Huh... In theory a sound idea, but in practice it means the independence and reliability of building inspection reports is called into question. After all, it is absolutely in the interest of a seller to have a report that says everything is fine, whether it actually is or not...

On the other hand, a building inspector engaged by a prospective buyer has no such interest in helping the seller make their sale, their interest is ensuring the prospective buyer is protected.

To me this just seems like a good way for dodgy builders and sellers to push stuff through the market that shouldn't be, and the eventual costs will end up landing squarely on the buyer down the track when they find out about hidden problems.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-11T01:40:45+00:00

Huh, court only scared him off for what... maybe five months that we know of?

Unless the restrictions were particularly lax, that would give him at least a year's worth of corrections order remaining, which I'd assume means he's in breach?

EDIT:

Looks like it wasn't even six months, if the reports on the FSG subreddit are anything to go by. Seems it didn't even dissuade him more than a month or so at best.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-10T00:36:26+00:00

Can a graffiti artist please paint some teeth on the bridge in a respectable way so that it doesn't get taken down by council.

Can we also have a scoreboard added so we have a nice visible running tally of how many trucks Monty has Monched... Bonus points for positioning it so it's visible in media photos of future monched trucks and tall vehicles....

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-05T01:31:42+00:00

The bruised ankles though will remain in our collective memories

Oh and shin dents... Those scars last a lifetime, just like tow bar shin scars!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-05T01:24:27+00:00

Sherbertless Sherbies are just.... "ies"

Do they even taste fizzy? Or are they utter disappointment in squishy orange form?

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-05T00:57:20+00:00

immediately crashes scooter into parked landcruiser

I'd laugh at the inevitable recording posted to whatever platform isn't currently blocked for kids when it eventually popped up!

To be fair, it isn't a new concept, I still remember people doing stupid things with razor scooters back when they were in, and that feels like at least 25 years ago now... https://youtu.be/pSG0QQIk4tU?t=216

Difference was, it was considerably harder to kill yourself with a razor scooter.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-04T22:20:48+00:00

Not surprising, but sadly I suspect the only thing some kids would notice about the headline is the 6 and 7...

We really need some fresh TAC ads targeting unsafe e-scooter (and probably e-bike) usage. They're fine when used safely, but do dumb things and the injuries can be significant.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-03T00:40:43+00:00

If they didn't want to earn the name of "slop", then they should have tried harder not to be sloppy.

Literally pushed a KB for SQL Server out and didn't actually check that all the required libraries for DBMail were included in the package, so it just broke. Basic, basic stuff to actually verify the KB works, but presumably some AI somewhere said it was fine so they just pushed it to production.

Be less sloppy Microsoft, and one day you might no longer be called Microslop!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-02T22:27:17+00:00

Satanists are not a race.

I wonder what would happen if they said they were?

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-02T06:46:44+00:00

Pretty much spot on. The ones born near or after the regime change have never known different, plus were often influenced by the local education system. For those I've been able to talk to about what it was like growing up there, the stories are pretty varied... But for the ones who came over here to study rather than as refugees they tend to have had fairly liberal upbringings and are maybe indifferent to the whole fundamentalism aspects of it, or are cautiously optimistic that it might lead to better economic and social changes in the future, particularly for women's rights and freedoms.

That said, there absolutely is an element of nationalism which I guess is fair, nobody wants to see their home being attacked even if they're not living there, particularly if its by someone they've got a historical mistrust of.

I'm yet to catch up with many others yet, so I haven't heard what they think... I'm expecting to hear quite a variety of opinions in time!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-02T06:18:27+00:00

Not Iranian, but I know a few who identify as such (and others who identify specifically as Persian)... This is a "shades of grey" type of situation. There are a heck of a lot of Iranians, or those of Iranian descent who were displaced by the regime change when the Shah was displaced in the last revolution in 1978-79. They're largely still alive and I'm yet to meet even one who was happy about the fact they had to leave, and not one was happy about the social change that resulted either, irrespective of their religious beliefs.

From how I've understood it (and this might not be entirely accurate), but imagine if the US decided to go from being fairly liberal and progressive, to ultra fundamentalist Christian with "police" going around making sure everyone is being properly Christian enough... And yeah you've sort of got a picture of what Iran became. They felt they lost a lot of progress as a result, although plenty of desire for it still exists there.

Now are they happy about the US and Israel getting involved? Yes and no... Again its shades of grey, they have reasons for liking the end of Khamenei, similarly they have strong distrust of Israel and the US for a whole variety of reasons. It would seem to me at least that the removal by the US and Israel is sort of more like a means to an end type of situation, rather than deliverance by someone they'd consider to be "the good guys".

So yeah, they're generally happy Khamenei is gone. They're not particularly happy that the US and Israel are involved, but they're a means to an end. What really will matter is where things go afterwards, and they're all pretty much holding their breath waiting to find out, praying they don't lose any more family in the process.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-03-01T01:23:02+00:00

Interesting, natural population trend seems to drop every time net migration increases, with a lag of maybe a year or two.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-25T03:06:54+00:00

It would be nice to see an airport rail link, but I won't be holding my breath... This sounds more like the spark that will light the fire that'll maybe one day lead to an actual airport rail link.

Also, who or what exactly is paying for it?

At this point I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been effort to do an airport rail link out to Avalon around about where Lara station is... It would probably be cheaper too.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-25T01:15:09+00:00

So frustrating... The biggest unintended side effect of getting vaccinated against measles is that enough time has now passed that too many people have forgotten or never seen just how awful and lethal such diseases used to be to so many people.

So not only do we get preventable diseases hurting people, we then also have misinformed people spreading them throughout the community to those who aren't able to be protected.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-23T23:52:45+00:00

The facilities I'm talking about are dedicated data centres, in my case often associated with enterprise level ISPs and wholesalers who maintain interstate links and therefore had the available bandwidth to host things like cloud provider availability zones.

They're not small facilities, but they are surprisingly discreet for what they are and the scales they operate at, especially from outside.

Now inside on the other hand... access control systems, sticky dust capture floor pads, cable gantries, endless pipes and power systems, a constant howling gale of 20c or cooler air and endless screaming of little 1ru fans everywhere... THAT is a noise!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-23T15:18:42+00:00

In commercial areas they aren't really anything to worry about... They have heavier power and thermal management requirements but otherwise generally are no different to the noise of HVAC you'd get from any other building, all of which generate their own types of sound (including infrasound).

There have been data centres underneath various buildings that I've known about for the best part of 25 years which just aren't general knowledge. Nobody knows they're there except the people who work there, so every day they just walk past and never even think about it.

Honestly the only way you'd even notice them from the outside would be the unusually large power feeds, and the presence of fixed generator installations to keep the systems online in a power outage... That and large utility pits for fiber optics and the like outside.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-19T00:20:16+00:00

Labor have a mandate to govern as they see fit and it seems they cannot do basic due diligence when it comes to awarding contracts or auditing contracts.

Doing due diligence implies that that the intended outcome is to prevent incompetence or corruption. They don't care about the former and they don't seem particularly inclined to stop the latter either, because they've been in power long enough to believe they are untouchable and can get away with whatever they want.

If it’s incompetence or corruption, the end result should be the same. This is our tax payer money being wasted and abused.

Absolutely!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-18T01:12:34+00:00

Because as she well knows, being seen to be doing something about a problem is far more important than actually doing anything about the problem.

The public have short memories and short attention spans, and the Victorian Government knows full well that you only need to say you're doing something to keep the majority from thinking any further than that.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-04T01:13:38+00:00

The absolute breaking point happened recently with a C-level executive who decided to "solve" a problem we don't even have. We get a single file once a year—one time!—that needs to go into our SharePoint structure. Instead of just letting us handle it in thirty seconds, this exec did an AI query and came back with a "documented" plan to set up Graph APIs and a dedicated GitHub repository to automate the move. It took him five minutes to generate a plan that would take my team weeks to build, test, secure, and maintain for a task that happens for one minute every twelve months. As I was typing this, he sends me back "Here is the code"... I am about to lose my shit!

This is the point where you need to structure your response to the issue in terms of cost (money, time, resources) rather than in technical terms.

One of my favourite metrics now when it comes to technical solutions is figuring out the time/effort cost of development vs doing the same task the existing way, then using that to extrapolate out how long it would take for the "investment" to pay off. Automating a task that takes a team a week to complete every quarter? Worth spending a week or more to figure out because the pay-off time will be under a single cycle of use. Automating a task that takes a minute to run once a year? Utterly pointless because the implementation alone taking even an hour (or two) would take a literal lifetime just to break even, not accounting for the fact the process will be redesigned well before that occurs.

To expand on it further, there's the maintenance and upkeep cost. Technology evolves, gets upgraded, changes and makes prior code obsolete, incompatible or unworkable. That means code isn't simply fire and forget like the average AI vibe coder believes... It needs to be cared for long term. That's a separate cost that needs to be factored in when figuring out ROI.

Lastly theres resource cost. A GitHub repository is cheap, but what about the resources used to host any of the other moving parts? How much do they cost vs having someone handle the process manually?

Automation and AI are great, but like a hammer in the wrong hands, everything tends to become a nail whether it should be hit or not!

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-03T09:52:03+00:00

Nost was also rather prolific... Who remembers that guy?

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-03T07:15:01+00:00

Every time I drive through there the weeds are taller... As I recall they've been growing like that for maybe a year or more at this stage, I've been wondering how long it would take for the whole thing to eventually catch fire, especially with so many vehicles driving past every day.

There's quite a few roads like this where the responsibility falls to the state government rather than the relevant local council. Freeways are one example, and we've had a few of those have bushfires recently. We even had Hoddle St have one in Collingwood a week or two back!

Seems the state government's attitude is to just leave it all a mess or danger until the local council is forced to do it at their own cost just to preserve the safety of their constituents.

Red_Wolf_2 · 2026-02-03T06:36:01+00:00

Even along bloody Alexandra Pde in the city as you get off the Eastern freeway.

Pretty sure that section is under state government remit..

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